Essays and information calling for Americans to choose a public option for national health care, with a particular emphasis on the excesses and abuses of health insurance companies in our current system.

That article, though, was about the group market. When you insure a large group, risk is distributed more widely and you can do things like look at historical data, rather than give individual physicals, and cut out a great deal of brokering and marketing. For the individual non-group market, which is especially important now that Fox News is reporting that 149 million Americans are unemployed, overhead is much, much higher. How high? I say I say, how high?

-- So high that insurance lobbies fought 2008 state laws that tried to restrict their 'loss ratio' (i.e. the percentage of income that they pay out in care) from going below 70%.

-- So high that they claim that 55 to 60% is average -- which means that for every dollar you give them, you have purchased the right to get two quarters and a dime's worth of health care.

That's hiiiiigh. Forgetting your debit-card at the grocery store while you're buying a bag of Doritos and a 2-liter bottle of Squirt high.

A public option would allow the government to create one large group out of this terribly underserved part of the population. These people have money; they need and deserve insurance -- although opponents of reform like to blame the victim ("I don't want to pay for somebody else's..."), these people would be happy just to have a deal similar to those who are covered by large companies. Large companies, I would add, that almost all started as tiny businesses, or groups of freelancers -- if we continue to unfairly punish customers on the individual or small-group market, we may not even have the next generation of innovative large businesses -- the financial and health risk won't be worth striking out on one's own.

But a 55% loss ratio (let's call it a 55% care ratio) makes insurance industries big financial players with a lot of money to throw around, and this is why we have Blanche Lincoln channeling Ronald Reagan in the Senate Finance Committee. 45% of our premium dollars are more than enough to buy a little democracy.

EDIT: but not all the democracy: progressive stalwart Shakesville transcribes this exchange between White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and ultrajournalist Helen Thomas, who has been asking him whether Obama will veto a health care bill without a public option over and over again for over a week.